Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Donald Trump's Federal Budget Psychosis Gets Visibly Worse

Before I say anything about Donald Trump’s latest federal budget craziness, let’s remember that he previously has willingly and apparently very proudly displayed his psychotic fiscal thinking.

As I said in this post, it was only a month or so ago that Trump revealed a tax cut plan the Tax Policy Center said will increase the deficit by an astounding $9.5 trillion over the next 10 years. And that was an understatement because it didn’t include the additional interest the government will have to pay because of the increased borrowing from the higher deficits.

Trump then compounded his budget lunacy by saying there would be no increase in the national debt because he would pay for it by cutting it the old-fashioned way — by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse.

Waste, fraud and abuse? The Tax Policy Center’s analysis shows that if military spending were untouched, to prevent more government borrowing Trump would either have to eliminate 82 percent of domestic appropriations or 41 percent of Medicare and Social Security.

But Trump has also said that he doesn’t want to leave the Pentagon’s budget untouched; he wants to increase it. He’s also said that he won’t cut Medicare and Social Security.

In other words, in a calculation that shows just how loony Trump’s waste, fraud and abuse plan would be, the 82 percent of all other domestic programs the TPC says would have to be cut would actually need to be far closer to 100 percent to do everything Trump says he wants to do.